What do you think?
Rate this book
The Way of Florida: A Novel
Relentless, urgent and above all musical, this expertly crafted debut novel recasts the tragic story of the failed Narváez expedition—a calamitous attempt to establish Spanish colonies along the Gulf Coast—in bracing, beautiful language. A timely narrative of botched colonialism, The Way of Florida radically reimagines the parameters and responsibilities of the historical novel.
Of the 300 crew sent inland to explore, only four survived an eight-year ordeal. Their story comes down to us via La Relación, the official report published in 1542, as well as many other subsequent retellings. Persson’s The Way of Florida is arguably the most linguistically rich, sinuous, and maybe even heroic.
Of the 300 crew sent inland to explore, only four survived an eight-year ordeal. Their story comes down to us via La Relación, the official report published in 1542, as well as many other subsequent retellings. Persson’s The Way of Florida is arguably the most linguistically rich, sinuous, and maybe even heroic.
- GenresFictionLiterature
256 pages, Hardcover
First published September 21, 2017
5 people are currently reading
405 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
Read
February 11, 2025Back in print today!
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh4BC...
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh4BC...
November 17, 2017
Hands down the best new release of the year. Of course, it’s the only new book released this year I read, making it the worst new release of the year also. So there’s that. Which, days end, renders it technically the absolute median, statistically-average, batting .500 'new fiction release of 2017 that I read' by default, when I think of it. Huh.
Impressionistic and episodic, this touched all my favorite sensitive and gooey spots. Let me be an asshole and use the term ‘fever dream’ to describe its blinking, in-and-out narrative, because that term hasn’t been used nearly enough (and I am far too lazy to think of anything original). Hey, did’ja hear the one about this book being a fever dream?
Best bit: there isn’t a fucking spot of sunlight anywhere in this hermitic and suffocating gem. 3AM-black. With a new moon. And heavy, heavy cloud coverage. And fog. Far away from electricity. During Winter. Above the Arctic Circle. I always appreciate that total commitment to brutal vision, some stories dictating their own tone.
OR
If you’re looking for an uncommon Christmas gift for that special Native-American/First Nations friend that will ensure your untimely and absolutely torturous murder, here ya go. Unless, of course, you’re a Native-American yourself—in which case you might just be a dick and ruin Christmas, but will certainly live to tell the tale.
Impressionistic and episodic, this touched all my favorite sensitive and gooey spots. Let me be an asshole and use the term ‘fever dream’ to describe its blinking, in-and-out narrative, because that term hasn’t been used nearly enough (and I am far too lazy to think of anything original). Hey, did’ja hear the one about this book being a fever dream?
Best bit: there isn’t a fucking spot of sunlight anywhere in this hermitic and suffocating gem. 3AM-black. With a new moon. And heavy, heavy cloud coverage. And fog. Far away from electricity. During Winter. Above the Arctic Circle. I always appreciate that total commitment to brutal vision, some stories dictating their own tone.
OR
If you’re looking for an uncommon Christmas gift for that special Native-American/First Nations friend that will ensure your untimely and absolutely torturous murder, here ya go. Unless, of course, you’re a Native-American yourself—in which case you might just be a dick and ruin Christmas, but will certainly live to tell the tale.
Read
August 25, 2021“And what that is is is.”
Excuse the grammatical stutter. What this is is a botched novel about botched colonialism. It leans on a strange archaic-modern prose style that’s curious at first, even mildly exciting in its potentially surrealistic syntax, but then it indulges in the taxing sin of tediousness as it’s clear that this is is is the only voice in the void we’ll hear from start to finish. Rather than being “musical above all,” as the copy claims, it’s choppy above all, like the waves you’ll starve upon for most of the book. There’s a penchant for long sentences that seem sutured together by the emptiness of punctuation rather than something woven with natural flow if not melody. One wishes that the author paid more attention to how Joseph McElroy does it. Even at Joe’s most eldritch, there’s always a sense of form rather than redundant clods of mud being smooshed together. The moments when the prose is successful are few, but at such times I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy; indeed, the repetitive, insular content also reminds me why Blood Meridian was lacking. There’s a dedication to the unrelenting that may be true of the time period but makes for a read that’s stilted, more so in this case. Unlike McCarthy, we don’t have much in the way of evocative word pairs, like “autistic darkness” in The Road or “death hilarious” in Blood Meridian. Also, Persson includes multiple instances of fucks or “enfucked” that are jarring as an anachronism at best, risible at worst. Could the following sentence be an apology, an excuse? “The hardship we dwelled in can not [sic] be limned in adequate phrases and you must bring with you the sketch of us and know it was more unchosen.”
Some risks were taken in this debut novel, which is more than I can say for most debuts, but overall I would recommend instead Abel Posse’s only two translated novels and Johnny Stanton’s Mangled Hands, which compensates for its monophony with a profusion of rich dream imagery, among other things.
Excuse the grammatical stutter. What this is is a botched novel about botched colonialism. It leans on a strange archaic-modern prose style that’s curious at first, even mildly exciting in its potentially surrealistic syntax, but then it indulges in the taxing sin of tediousness as it’s clear that this is is is the only voice in the void we’ll hear from start to finish. Rather than being “musical above all,” as the copy claims, it’s choppy above all, like the waves you’ll starve upon for most of the book. There’s a penchant for long sentences that seem sutured together by the emptiness of punctuation rather than something woven with natural flow if not melody. One wishes that the author paid more attention to how Joseph McElroy does it. Even at Joe’s most eldritch, there’s always a sense of form rather than redundant clods of mud being smooshed together. The moments when the prose is successful are few, but at such times I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy; indeed, the repetitive, insular content also reminds me why Blood Meridian was lacking. There’s a dedication to the unrelenting that may be true of the time period but makes for a read that’s stilted, more so in this case. Unlike McCarthy, we don’t have much in the way of evocative word pairs, like “autistic darkness” in The Road or “death hilarious” in Blood Meridian. Also, Persson includes multiple instances of fucks or “enfucked” that are jarring as an anachronism at best, risible at worst. Could the following sentence be an apology, an excuse? “The hardship we dwelled in can not [sic] be limned in adequate phrases and you must bring with you the sketch of us and know it was more unchosen.”
Some risks were taken in this debut novel, which is more than I can say for most debuts, but overall I would recommend instead Abel Posse’s only two translated novels and Johnny Stanton’s Mangled Hands, which compensates for its monophony with a profusion of rich dream imagery, among other things.
January 2, 2018
Faith is therefore no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence – Fear and Trembling – Soren Kierkegaard
The best novels are never confined. They avoid simple reductionism or definition, they’re as amorphous as history itself. They can never really be known, although of course obscurantism for obscurantism’s sake is a loathsome goal and we must be wary. Criticism tries but is only ever a terse gesture towards themes or subjective readings, a celebration mostly, the proverbial bigging up. The best novels are about everything.
The Way of Florida is one of those novels. It elevates itself above its context, although it doesn’t use its context, it doesn’t simply rohypnol it and go for a quick fumble, and it never feels like a crutch or burden, there’s a respect and duty paid, it never loses sight or tries too hard to break away and be something more, this something more is achieved through Persson’s keen moral eye and spiritual concern and his assiduous handling of an now almost alien time in human history.
It’s as such we sail or drift us in this sea who calls our path. The maize in its own lessening. How could the sky in day see fit to spend us like it does? This in turn is answered. The gathered clouds. The wind who moves a bird against its usual wing into a tumble. The wave who begins to have a tip crested turned over into a brief witness the lip of what’s coming. A still wind over the tips enough to move the smell of what’s coming on to us and then a wind rises gusted at times and risen into the unwelcome.
The language is neither anachronistic or pastiche, maybe it’s a weird blend between the two I’m not sure, but it doesn’t feel like either, wholly the author’s own, a brilliant run-on hybrid that just when you feel Persson has lost it he snaps it back to his command like a ringmaster does his whip. There’s a delirium to the prose but also a sanity, a thoroughness and rich sincerity. It doesn’t sound like it’s from the past, in fact the total opposite, it’s a voice from the future and is all the better for it – the sort of prose Vollmann has occasionally managed but never sustained for a whole novel the way Persson does here.
But is it each his own read of what’s above?
The sections are hypnotic at times and it can be easy to overlook much of the novel’s deeper and more profound ideas as they come nestled within each euphonious burst, stuff like “Men at arms do they come ready in this life for moving a fast arm against another man?” It raises the old questions of man’s inhumanity to man, the ideas of violence begetting violence, trust vs suspicion within the nature of man, whether consequence justifies certain amoral actions, but there’s a spiritual muscle at work, this is a conversation with God, with faith, with one’s own sins, with one’s own humanity “I find myself a marvel that I proceed at all though I marvel again at the enormity I carry and at the lands inside me yet to fold out”.
At the start of the novel we’re introduced to this ship with 400 men and 80 horses and this is cut down throughout the book until we’re left with no horses and less than half a dozen men. This kind of weakening is important when considering the novel’s stance on human potentiality and when coupled with Heidegger’s view on potentiality. Heidegger’s reading of Paul embraces a weakness in the human condition, that what we move towards to become we cannot actually become, much in the same way that what the narrator and crew chase is not attained, importantly this arc occurs under the guise of faith – for me what you have then in this Heideggerian predicament is a powerlessness that becomes a kind of triumph or at least a revelation that helps us better understand our potentiality, the last sentence is crucially dealt callously as a way to question our intentions over a power we do possess and that we must confront.
There is a challenge within this book both for and against someone like John Gray’s naturalised and Darwinian re-description of original sin, the idea that we’re all just essentially killer apes, homo-rapiens as Gray calls us. But as this book demonstrates, we might be apes and capable of inhumanity for inhumanities sake given a certain context or none at all, but, crucially, we have a strong metaphysical longing, a suspicion about us of a deeper spiritual connection to what we call world – this novel is about a literal journey and period of discovery and colonisation but this serves as metaphor for the wider and more profound journey and discovery this book tackles, the journey of faith and the epiphanies there in.
Are we not the sons of trees? . . . Are we not the sons of almond and the sons of our home trees the nut elm and the leg oak we look back on to the trees of our home and they are bark and knee and bowl and canopy and we fasten us to them here to so live throughout the blow.
Just as a kind of addendum to this point and linking to the quote above, the idea of the Earth and “mother nature” and our place in the ecosystem is also interwoven within the narrative, it’s impossible to escape I guess in a novel featuring treacherous seas and burning sand but it’s an interesting aspect of the novel and again provides a deeper layer to the themes presented.
As the narrator and his crew and the Indians suffer from every type of exhaustion imaginable the malnutrition comes through in the voice, and coupled with the inexorable evocations of God, you might think he’s speaking in tongues at some points, the whole body of the text is warped and vexed under the brutal conditions of narrator and crew as the text begins to resemble their makeshift rafts on those dubious seas.
So more ready to continue as if the weather and the sea waves had a mind and that mind was set to go on and its eyes were open and direct upon you unblinking almost in savour of the turmoil it hands out. Us gullied out on the worn maps of Him sunken down into the grooves cut deep by all who came before and augured into the sand of their own claim.
Do you believe that everything is random, do you believe like Bast in Gaddis’s JR that order is simply a thin perilous condition we impose on the true nature of chaos, that determinism itself is chaos and that chaos is deterministic, that we are all just matter and tiny particles (that’s basically pulsing light continually coming and going into and out of existence taken at the most minute level, some Planck scale) and that we’re all just this stuff playing itself out like pool balls flung across a table, seemingly chaotic but ultimately predictable and our paths defined – and if indeed it is all paved, our sins and all, do you believe that there is some meaning to it all at the end and what exactly is meaning given such a predicament?
The final sentence rocked me and helped refine much of what I’d read to that point. I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t want to muddy other people’s opinions or readings but I will say that there is suffering we can do little about and all we have is God and speculation for that, and mercy and sorrow and regret, but the true horror is horror we can do something about but condone or participate in anyway.
“Endings, instead, possess me . . .” – William Frederick Kohler
January 2, 2018
"I beside her shot on film or tried to his dive" - Joseph McElroy (from Cannonball)
"We on our boat put down into the sea an arm and then an oar to follow him to land” - Persson
“I’ve in nights longer than this such a spell longer gone paced in halls to wait out the word of another ranked up above me” - Persson
"Children are always thinking are very often thinking that their mothers are very lovely looking and that is very often because mostly the child is always close up to the mother close to her when the child is looking and mostly being close like that as a habitual thing is to find that one a lovely thing a lovely looking one." Gertrude Stein (from The Making of Americans)
"She died by nature who it was to come leaving us without her. And our men have died up to now and death it has been a steady hand with us to now and duly measured we’ve all been guided near some death or so. So our nature is to walk and our nature is to keep by the sitting of an elder in her shudders and in turn to walk." Persson
"Until then there had not been a council but now the governor calls a council by each a man will come to him and tell some idea of how to go." Persson
” The second raft was good until the meat of the river where the current was the most and drew them out to sea where they became small to the shore and two men swam back to shore and two men who were in a swim to shore came to the sea and died down underneath it and the one man left on the raft he stayed the raft and stood himself upright so that his body was jibbed and brought the raft with him back to shore by cause of the wind behind him.” Persson
”
It happens very often that a man has it in him, that a man does something, that he does it very often that he does many things, when he is a young man when he is an old man, when he is an older man. One of such of these kind of them had a little boy and this one, the little son wanted to make a collection of butterflies and beetles and it was all exciting to him and it was all arranged then and then the father said to the son you are certain this is not a cruel thing that you are wanting to be doing, killing things to make collections of them, and the son was very disturbed then and they talked about it together the two of them and more and more they talked about it then and then at last the boy was convinced it was a cruel thing and he said he would not do it and his father said the little boy was a noble boy to give up pleasure when it was a cruel one. The boy went to bed then and then the father when he got up in the early morning saw a wonderfully beautiful moth in the room and he caught him and he killed him and he pinned him and he woke up his son then and showed it to him and he said to him see what a good father I am to have caught and killed this one, the boy was all mixed up inside him and then he said he would go on with his collecting and that was all there was then of discussing and this is a little description of something that happened once and it is very interesting.” Stein - from the Making of Americans (which I confess I quote not really because it was the best I could find to demonstrate the similarity, but because I love it)
"We on our boat put down into the sea an arm and then an oar to follow him to land” - Persson
“I’ve in nights longer than this such a spell longer gone paced in halls to wait out the word of another ranked up above me” - Persson
"Children are always thinking are very often thinking that their mothers are very lovely looking and that is very often because mostly the child is always close up to the mother close to her when the child is looking and mostly being close like that as a habitual thing is to find that one a lovely thing a lovely looking one." Gertrude Stein (from The Making of Americans)
"She died by nature who it was to come leaving us without her. And our men have died up to now and death it has been a steady hand with us to now and duly measured we’ve all been guided near some death or so. So our nature is to walk and our nature is to keep by the sitting of an elder in her shudders and in turn to walk." Persson
"Until then there had not been a council but now the governor calls a council by each a man will come to him and tell some idea of how to go." Persson
” The second raft was good until the meat of the river where the current was the most and drew them out to sea where they became small to the shore and two men swam back to shore and two men who were in a swim to shore came to the sea and died down underneath it and the one man left on the raft he stayed the raft and stood himself upright so that his body was jibbed and brought the raft with him back to shore by cause of the wind behind him.” Persson
”
It happens very often that a man has it in him, that a man does something, that he does it very often that he does many things, when he is a young man when he is an old man, when he is an older man. One of such of these kind of them had a little boy and this one, the little son wanted to make a collection of butterflies and beetles and it was all exciting to him and it was all arranged then and then the father said to the son you are certain this is not a cruel thing that you are wanting to be doing, killing things to make collections of them, and the son was very disturbed then and they talked about it together the two of them and more and more they talked about it then and then at last the boy was convinced it was a cruel thing and he said he would not do it and his father said the little boy was a noble boy to give up pleasure when it was a cruel one. The boy went to bed then and then the father when he got up in the early morning saw a wonderfully beautiful moth in the room and he caught him and he killed him and he pinned him and he woke up his son then and showed it to him and he said to him see what a good father I am to have caught and killed this one, the boy was all mixed up inside him and then he said he would go on with his collecting and that was all there was then of discussing and this is a little description of something that happened once and it is very interesting.” Stein - from the Making of Americans (which I confess I quote not really because it was the best I could find to demonstrate the similarity, but because I love it)
Read
May 16, 2018Did a review of this book here: https://youtu.be/Po4yvvQNrew
June 20, 2018
Take the story of a vast early expedition struggle, chop it down, stress it until it surges riverlike and the reader cruises through it like they’re being sucked in one end to be spat out the other; That’s the hydrodynamically engineered prose found in this book, where each sentence seems to run into and flow through its descendant.
A sprawling account (based around ‘The journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’) of shipwreck, starvation, encounters with natives, delirium, suffering and death in its most (blunt) head-on descriptions as if none were avoidable and were fated to take place that minute through those circumstances.
A feature of the writing on display here I particularly enjoyed was that anything beyond the explorers’ field of influence was given personality through referring to those things as an entity threatening the survival of the expedition. The land, natives, days, sounds and weathers are given the power and almost a human ‘responsibility of choices’ that an opposing soldier would be afforded and held accountable for, putting the explorers in the position of enemies in unfamiliar territory wherein everything is against them.
The book runs through countless ambushes, misfortunes and sicknesses that strip the men of any morale until their faith in the Lord pushes them onward. This too is pushed onto the reader full-force through the unconventional style of the writing.
Here, the journey is sprawling and could have a door-stopper written about the historical events but, everything is condensed masterfully through creating incredibly powerful snapshots of events, resulting in ~250 pages that never has the reader feeling lost in the years long tale it’s telling.
The heat and cold, sickness and loneliness, and the trusts they form with the natives is packed into each highly focussed section, creating one of the most immersive historical fictions I’ve read, until the book creeps to a halt and presents the reality of the men’s original purpose. A stark and timelessly crucial contrast from the very human tone presented in the core of the text.
A sprawling account (based around ‘The journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’) of shipwreck, starvation, encounters with natives, delirium, suffering and death in its most (blunt) head-on descriptions as if none were avoidable and were fated to take place that minute through those circumstances.
A feature of the writing on display here I particularly enjoyed was that anything beyond the explorers’ field of influence was given personality through referring to those things as an entity threatening the survival of the expedition. The land, natives, days, sounds and weathers are given the power and almost a human ‘responsibility of choices’ that an opposing soldier would be afforded and held accountable for, putting the explorers in the position of enemies in unfamiliar territory wherein everything is against them.
“A river who ran with a great depth and haste” p33These lands, natives, weathers… are as one, as an unknown to the men on their journey.
“The days who follow” p37
The book runs through countless ambushes, misfortunes and sicknesses that strip the men of any morale until their faith in the Lord pushes them onward. This too is pushed onto the reader full-force through the unconventional style of the writing.
Here, the journey is sprawling and could have a door-stopper written about the historical events but, everything is condensed masterfully through creating incredibly powerful snapshots of events, resulting in ~250 pages that never has the reader feeling lost in the years long tale it’s telling.
The heat and cold, sickness and loneliness, and the trusts they form with the natives is packed into each highly focussed section, creating one of the most immersive historical fictions I’ve read, until the book creeps to a halt and presents the reality of the men’s original purpose. A stark and timelessly crucial contrast from the very human tone presented in the core of the text.
April 23, 2018
I really don’t know what to say. I’ve never read anything quite like The Way of Florida. It’s more like an epic poem than a traditional novel, and it resembles no other historical fiction I’ve found. The prose begs to be read aloud, and slowly so as to allow the complexity of the vivid language on display to be savored and appreciated fully. Even so, as slow a journey as I tried to make my reading, I couldn’t help but be swept along and in the end it only took me a few days to read through it. Indeed, I found it hard to stop reading and put the book down. Reading it was addictive and thrilling in a peculiar way I’ve encountered with little else.
In short, The Way of Florida is a stunning debut novel. Russell Persson is the real deal and I can’t wait to see what he does next. Highly recommended.
In short, The Way of Florida is a stunning debut novel. Russell Persson is the real deal and I can’t wait to see what he does next. Highly recommended.
October 12, 2017
I had high expectations for this and it did not deliver. I've seen a couple people compare the prose to McElroy... I don't see it at all and find the entire notion offensive.
There are moments where the prose sing, but only fragments here and there. On the whole, a forgettable read. Luckily, with only 1/3 of most pages having actual text, the 249 pages take about 10 minutes to read.
There are moments where the prose sing, but only fragments here and there. On the whole, a forgettable read. Luckily, with only 1/3 of most pages having actual text, the 249 pages take about 10 minutes to read.
February 23, 2021
Beautiful in its tragic experience. It's depths are fractions to the what we feel in ourselves, not just in our souls but in our hearts: the suffering to live, to know, to feel, too death.
April 29, 2019
I first heard this book on PaperBird's youtube channel. His videos are great, and I appreciate being brought to this wonderful book. Secondly, I want to mention the aesthetics of the physical book are absolutely wonderful.
Unfortunately, Joel Osteen wasn't around to give spiritual guidance to the crew of the Narvaez expedition. His message seems to be finely tuned for those suffering from first world problems such as anxiety or fear of social media rejection, but doesn't seem as relevant for those who found themselves with a case of insomnia out of fear of being hit by flying arrows.
What struck me was how awkward and foreign the style is, almost other worldly. For me the reading experience was like the author was recounting some astral projection where part of his soul inhabited the body of the narrator and vividly experienced what the narrator felt. The judicious use of the word "fuck" furthered the notion that this book is some kind of weird frankensteinsh synthesis of multiple experiences, multiple visions, multiple voices all from multiple times merging into a singular voice.
For modern readers the word Florida inspires thoughts of Disney World, sandy beaches, and poolside margaritas. The way of Florida is markedly different than this plastic modern projection that goes through our head. This is the real Florida - a Florida of pain, suffering, and anguish. Perhaps we can now understand the sacrifices of both the conquerors and the conquered as well as the ensuing genocide that paved the way for the America we know today.
Cormac McCarthy once wrote that if God wanted to intervene in the degeneracy of mankind he would have done so by now. All the incantations and references to God only serve to reiterate the point that God doesn't seem to be listening, or perhaps he's just one mean son-of-a-bitch. Or, maybe as Julian Jaynes posits - there's some part of our brain that talks to us, and it's these voices that give rise to our supernatural beliefs.
It's a challenge to understand other people. This challenge is amplified when we talk about people from different time periods and different cultures. One thing that really strikes me (especially with relation to the ending) is our almost child like conceptions of good and evil. For a reader today (who lives comfortably in a developed country) this entire work seems other worldly. We don't treat these people as real....they seem artificial...from an uncivilized era. It's full of horrors that we ourselves couldn't possibly conceive. Get that mirror out because this book describes people just like me and you.
"Ask God to give you the strength to endure, and rest assured, He will take care of you." --Joel Osteen
Unfortunately, Joel Osteen wasn't around to give spiritual guidance to the crew of the Narvaez expedition. His message seems to be finely tuned for those suffering from first world problems such as anxiety or fear of social media rejection, but doesn't seem as relevant for those who found themselves with a case of insomnia out of fear of being hit by flying arrows.
What struck me was how awkward and foreign the style is, almost other worldly. For me the reading experience was like the author was recounting some astral projection where part of his soul inhabited the body of the narrator and vividly experienced what the narrator felt. The judicious use of the word "fuck" furthered the notion that this book is some kind of weird frankensteinsh synthesis of multiple experiences, multiple visions, multiple voices all from multiple times merging into a singular voice.
For modern readers the word Florida inspires thoughts of Disney World, sandy beaches, and poolside margaritas. The way of Florida is markedly different than this plastic modern projection that goes through our head. This is the real Florida - a Florida of pain, suffering, and anguish. Perhaps we can now understand the sacrifices of both the conquerors and the conquered as well as the ensuing genocide that paved the way for the America we know today.
Cormac McCarthy once wrote that if God wanted to intervene in the degeneracy of mankind he would have done so by now. All the incantations and references to God only serve to reiterate the point that God doesn't seem to be listening, or perhaps he's just one mean son-of-a-bitch. Or, maybe as Julian Jaynes posits - there's some part of our brain that talks to us, and it's these voices that give rise to our supernatural beliefs.
It's a challenge to understand other people. This challenge is amplified when we talk about people from different time periods and different cultures. One thing that really strikes me (especially with relation to the ending) is our almost child like conceptions of good and evil. For a reader today (who lives comfortably in a developed country) this entire work seems other worldly. We don't treat these people as real....they seem artificial...from an uncivilized era. It's full of horrors that we ourselves couldn't possibly conceive. Get that mirror out because this book describes people just like me and you.
September 13, 2018
Just going to keep this super short: I was blown away by this novel - by its language and style, its authentic feeling, its ability to make me feel what it would be like in a strange land with no language, no home, no base. I was sucked into the story, the Spanish colonialists, the various tribes from Tampa, Florida to the Texas gulf to the last Christians on their horses in Panuco. Even the book's design is beautiful which is a nod to the folks at Little Island Press - a striking green hardback with small white font on the cover, deep red inside covers, and spacious wide margins on the pages that somehow gives the language room to breathe. Russell Persson is some kind of damn talent and I've been bowled over by his retelling and reimagining of the disaster that was the Narvaez expedition. Bowled over so much that I'm compelled to read more on this subject if only to connect deeper with the story told by Persson. How he took this tragedy and built this deep of a story in the directions he did and the words he used, I will never know and nor do I need to.
June 4, 2020
Ah, man. I wanted to love it. Blood Meridian is a tough act to follow; what's left of it anyway. The stars are for the language which is lucid and florid and haunting and infinite. But the leitmotif of hunger and thirst sweeping through almost every page, well, I'm pretty sure the author has never missed a meal. It just didn't ring true. There are some striking autobiographical passages, statements on memory and the retelling of our lives, but the rest of it gets submerged in an Olympian effort to make a Great Work of Art. Without letting it Be. But this is definitely a promising debut and I will read Persson's next novel.
Also, what was with the contemporary use of profanity? Not that I'm prudish; Everything 'enfucked,' and realising 'the deep fuck we were in,' made me laugh in a way I don't think was intentional. It seemed like the author was all of a sudden there in all his 21st century whitedude glory for those few syllables and then we were plunged back into this impressionistic vision of 16th century colonialism. I would have appreciated it if it were not so jarring.
Also, what was with the contemporary use of profanity? Not that I'm prudish; Everything 'enfucked,' and realising 'the deep fuck we were in,' made me laugh in a way I don't think was intentional. It seemed like the author was all of a sudden there in all his 21st century whitedude glory for those few syllables and then we were plunged back into this impressionistic vision of 16th century colonialism. I would have appreciated it if it were not so jarring.
January 14, 2018
Disastrous Spanish colonialism of Gulf Coast recounted in uniquely difficult, fragmentary, poetic language that seems historically authentic. A repetitive, oppressive, bleak fever dream in a highly original voice.
August 7, 2025
The historical account of the Narvaez Expedition by Cabeza de Vaca would no doubt be fascinating, but this effort at its novelization proved to be quite tedious due to the author's attempt at creating his own exotic writing style.
January 21, 2019
a new maker of run-on sentences that feel effortless but never weak and who shapes words delicately and gifts them with fresh dimensions. my only wish was for them to have forsaken god by the end.
December 29, 2017
The excerpts [ii] leaved me mostly unimpressed, but they didn’t seem that bad either so the least (xor, the best?) I hoped was run into some historical metafiction in the Vollman’s manner–of which I am fan (albeit moderate). But as it wraps up, Russell’s take at turning the Naufragios y relación de la jornada que hizo a la Florida into a history drama enriched with refined prose and faulknerian phrasing do fail, for my side, on quite a few levels. Historical events, geographical setting, cultural milieu (how you would expect this to affect the narrative? Forget it) and the pace of the story telling itself are basically cohered at minimum revs, rather coalescing into a dubious prose-centred mist; dubious because it patently looks more just of an excuse framework solution in search of a problem, or, idk, as an occasioning ramp for those lyrical parts that patently smell like a void filler as Persson indulges long enough, namely all the times (I also found the Narvaéz’s character, while complex and maybe in accordance with some literary received vulgate, quite monodimensionally depicted).
Style-wise, *I guess* the author is a talentend one, though his sustained abuse of run-on sentences (more often than not supporting monologizing, winged-reasoning drifts at the borderline of tediousness) certainly fails to be processed as an authorial mark, and appears a bit of a shortcut, if not a sign of a genuine and complacent disinterest to handle an increasingly pale plot whose boundaries go wide of the mark and become even more relentlessly divorced from the diegetic, and stilistical, flow. I didn’t really feel like the blanket of historical drama in backgroud would suffice to justify the poor building on so many levels, nor that it would’ve determined any significant trade-off on the purple prose side.
Style-wise, *I guess* the author is a talentend one, though his sustained abuse of run-on sentences (more often than not supporting monologizing, winged-reasoning drifts at the borderline of tediousness) certainly fails to be processed as an authorial mark, and appears a bit of a shortcut, if not a sign of a genuine and complacent disinterest to handle an increasingly pale plot whose boundaries go wide of the mark and become even more relentlessly divorced from the diegetic, and stilistical, flow. I didn’t really feel like the blanket of historical drama in backgroud would suffice to justify the poor building on so many levels, nor that it would’ve determined any significant trade-off on the purple prose side.
June 27, 2024
The sharp oyster beds cut into the feet and to move in the water is a slowness. There is quiet around you there. The sun is almost welcome. Is almost a wanted sun up above the window of the sea you wade through the bending sights below all bended and rippled you pass a hand through that waterpane and see your arm take an angle to the oyster there. If all is well there will be a sound of how you pass a hand into the neath. Unlike any other sound, there are certain sounds only your own hand can make. And so it jingles a bellish chime. Or what I can not hope to describe but you must believe in the silence the note is beauty the note is clear to me. Those men so close to our encampment there on a stillness day the silent arrows in paths to them from the hidden groves, the skill and brute with which they. I have a heart who lives in them.
Here and there an order goes out. Here and there a man takes it upon himself to put an oar into the sea and try to guess something. To in a way vote one way or another on how we go. There was a try at first to remain near the shore to see it there but wind and current soon brought us way from that.
The moon was with us. And I turned my body. We were in general a splay, some back to back, some rested back on the knees of him in back of him. So I turned my body. I was not leaned for myself and the inspector as men in charge we could not lean on another man so truly. As such, self supported, I turned my body to an angle of the moon as a man would to converse with another. There was a new side awake in me as the men slept around me. My back was straight and I felt as if I had just taken a draught of water and a cooler wind was directed into my breathing. My eyes became open and I could almost stand. To recall this now is a double knife at once in service and then also turned inward. For the manner I held and for the shape the men were in. I turned my body in the direction it only could go. Drawn as I was to the way I went. There was no other way. I revisit this in full and clear sight.
*
Here and there an order goes out. Here and there a man takes it upon himself to put an oar into the sea and try to guess something. To in a way vote one way or another on how we go. There was a try at first to remain near the shore to see it there but wind and current soon brought us way from that.
The moon was with us. And I turned my body. We were in general a splay, some back to back, some rested back on the knees of him in back of him. So I turned my body. I was not leaned for myself and the inspector as men in charge we could not lean on another man so truly. As such, self supported, I turned my body to an angle of the moon as a man would to converse with another. There was a new side awake in me as the men slept around me. My back was straight and I felt as if I had just taken a draught of water and a cooler wind was directed into my breathing. My eyes became open and I could almost stand. To recall this now is a double knife at once in service and then also turned inward. For the manner I held and for the shape the men were in. I turned my body in the direction it only could go. Drawn as I was to the way I went. There was no other way. I revisit this in full and clear sight.
*
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews